A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post other links below.

The government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is rewriting the nation’s environmental laws to speed the extraction and export of oil, minerals and other materials to a global market clamoring for Canada’s natural resources. [Washington Post]

The government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is rewriting the nation’s environmental laws to speed the extraction and export of oil, minerals and other materials to a global market clamoring for Canada’s natural resources….

“The idea is simple and straightforward: to make Canada the most attractive country in the world for resource investment and development, and to enhance our world-class protection of the environment today for future generations of Canadians,” said Christopher Plunkett, spokesman for the Canadian government in the United States.

Rick Smith, executive director of the advocacy group Environmental Defence Canada, calls it “a war on nature and democracy.” At least 500 Canadian organizations, along with several hundred in the United States, will darken their Web sites or publish notices Monday to protest the changes as part of a “Black Out, Speak Out” demonstration.

“This is the most anti-environmental legislation we’ve seen in decades,” Smith said. “Very clearly, a lot of these changes are designed to expedite inappropriate pipeline proposals. It’s essentially a big gift to Big Oil.”

Plants and shrubs have colonised parts of the Arctic tundra in recent decades growing into small trees, a scientific study found, adding the change may lead to an increase in global warming pressures if replicated on a wider scale. [Reuters]

The government has been trying to water down key environmental regulations in Brussels despite trumpeting its commitment to green issues at home, leaked documents show. [Guardian]

Years of ferocious storms have threatened to gnaw away the western tip of a popular beachfront park two hours drive north of Los Angeles. Instead of building a 500-foot-long wooden defense next to the pier to tame the tide, the latest thinking is to flee. [Washington Post]

After recalculating data, climatologists have declared that Oklahoma last year suffered through the hottest summer ever recorded in the United States — not Texas as initially announced last fall. [New York Times]

If you miss this year’s synchronized firefly display in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, you can blame it on freakishly warm spring weather, perhaps linked to predicted weather extremes caused by global warming. [Summit County Citizens Voice]

Natives downstream from the oilsands in northern Alberta say they have caught more deformed fish in Lake Athabasca and will be sending them away for testing. [The Canadian Press]

RAIN and flooding that led to a state of emergency in Thunder Bay last week was the result of record weather — one more sign that things aren’t right. It would appear that climate change is very much upon us.

In the face of staggeringly rapid changes in Ontario, the Harper regime is, just like Rightwing pathocracies in Australian states, destroying generations of painstaking work in environmental protection. All while paying tribute to their ideological and spiritual forebears by invoking the Big Lie that they are actually ‘improving’ environmental protection. You know, it’s everywhere these days, the Lie so Big that ordinary people, who are troubled by their consciences when they lie, cannot believe that anyone would have the audacity or contempt for others to tell such a whopper, and hence believe that it must be true.

Well, we knew this was going to happen eventually – but now scientists
are actually seeing it with their own eyes. Researchers from Finland
and Oxford University have discovered that large swaths of European
and Asian arctic tundra are quickly turning into forests. They’re attributing it to climate change, but what’s worse is that the trend could significantly accelerate global warming should it spread across the entire tundra.

QUOTES:

“It’s a big surprise that these plants are reacting in this way,” said Dr Marc Macias-Fauria of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology and the Oxford Martin School, first author of the paper. “Previously people had thought that the tundra might be colonised by trees from the boreal forest to the south as the Arctic climate warms, a process that would take centuries. But what we’ve found is that the shrubs that are already there are transforming into trees in just a few decades.”

“The speed and magnitude of the observed change is far greater than we expected,” said Professor Bruce Forbes of the Arctic
Centre, University of Lapland, corresponding author of the paper.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be forced into an Indian Reservation and then find the fish have gone toxic. I hear that cancer rates in this Reserve are astronomical, but a lot of energy is directed toward keeping the situation quiet.